Previous roles of this year’s Oscar nominees: Best Supporting Actor

Every day this week we’ll showcase the nominees in one of the top categories for this Sunday’s 86th Oscars ceremony by highlighting another previous performance from them that might have passed you by. Today we offer the Best Supporting Actor contenders.

He does have three Hangover movies on his resume, as well as All About Steve, Failure to Launch and The Midnight Meat Train. This is true. But somehow a Sexiest Man Alive designation coincided with a recent run of great performances.

The Place Beyond the Pines: Yes, he has two consecutive Oscar nods with 2012′s Silver Linings Playbook and last year’s American Hustle. But in between he also managed to sneak in this unjustly ignored ambitious drama that’s near and dear to our area’s collective heart. While Ryan Gosling rightfully commanded the lion’s share of attention for his part in the Schenectady triptych, Cooper has an even heavier load and he carries it masterfully.

Fassbender is three for three with director Steve McQueen after Hunger, Shame and now 12 Years a Slave. But this German-Irish actor has been so good in so many things, this will surely be the first of many nominations.

Inglourious Basterds: Quentin Tarantino’s audacious, revisionist World War II epic was a showcase for many performers, but none as much as Fassbender (excepting, of course, Christoph Waltz). When he first shows up on screen as a British army officer/film critic specializing in German cinema it is one of the movies’ ultimate “Who. Is. That. Guy?” kind of moments.

I’ll bet that no one is more surprised to hear the phrase “two-time Oscar nominee Jonah Hill” than Jonah Hill himself. Even in his earlier, Judd Apatow-approved comedies, though, he brought an edge that’s now playing out beautifully as he makes the leap to the mythical “serious actor” territory.

Cyrus: This 2010 Duplass Brothers flick is almost the perfect midway point between Hill’s comedy chops and the newly praised dramatic talents. Here he plays the off-putting and way too attached adult son of Marisa Tomei (Let that parent-child combo sit for a while) who gets in the middle of her new relationship with sad sack John C. Reilly and is eerily effective. There’s a great villain role lurking inside him.

Many men doubtless feel the same way about Leto as women do with the parade of super-talented model-like actresses who routinely surprise with their performances: He’s too pretty to be this good. But even as far back as his sensitive yet clueless high school heartthrob on My So Called Life, he was proving that there was much more than meets the eye.

Sunset Strip: Here’s a movie with the bones to be a great one, but instead just turned out to be kind of meh. With a little more time and effort put into the script and direction, this 2000 comedy-drama about one day in the life of the denizens of the titular Hollywood street in 1972 could have been epic. What it does have going for it is Leto as a wild, long-haired rock star (hmmm …), and it’s an electrifying portrait. His is a manic and over-the-top performance, but Leto maintains control throughout. He is magnetic and blows away everyone else on screen. It’s one of those times when you wished you could have been watching a whole different movie solely focused on his character.